His second session with Dr. Halpern quickly came the next day, this time no tests were taken, according to her, they were here to 'just talk'.
Dr. Halpern's office looked different the second time without the folders and test booklets covering the worktable. She had moved them somewhere and the table was clear except for a yellow notepad on her side and a glass of water on his.
She sat across from him with her legs crossed and her pen in her hand but not writing anything yet.
"No tests today," she said.
"Today I just want to talk." She settled back in her chair in a relaxed manner "Is that okay?"
"Yes."
She looked at him for a moment. "How are you finding school so far?"
Oh, i dont know try to spend your time, with loud Obnoxious, nasty kids that Pick their noses and dont even hide it, smelling weird, breathing with their mouths open, chewing with their mouths open.
Always sticky, always, he didn't know what it was nor He did want to know.
"Fine."
Of course he wouldn't say that
"Fine like it's good, or fine like it's tolerable."
He looked at her, that was a better question than he had expected for an opener.
"Tolerable," he said.
She wrote something. "What makes it tolerable rather than good."
"The work isn't difficult, i dont share much with my classmates."
"What would make it difficult."
"Different work."
She smiled slightly. "What kind of different work."
He considered how much to say, enough to be consistent with everything the tests had already shown.
Not so much that it stopped sounding like a child.
"Math that has more than one step," he said. "Reading that requires you to think about what you read rather than just remember it. Problems where the answer isn't obvious from the question."
She wrote. "Do you ever find that outside school? Problems like that?"
"Sometimes. When I read."
"What are you reading right now."
"One of my dad's anatomy books." He paused. "About the musculoskeletal system."
She looked up from her notepad. "What about it specifically."
"The spine mostly. How it distributes load. The way the vertebrae are stacked.
it's basically a column under compression, same as a structural support, except it has to flex and rotate and absorb impact at the same time." He stopped. "I find the engineering of it interesting."
"The engineering of it," she repeated.
"The way it solves problems. How much weight it can handle, how the discs work as shock absorbers, why certain configurations cause failure." He glanced at her. "My dad adjusts spines all day. I wanted to understand what he was actually doing."
Dr. Halpern wrote for a moment without speaking.
"Does he know you're reading his books?"
"He gave them to me," Jake said. "He seemed happy about it."
She wrote for a moment without speaking.
"Jake," she said. "When you're in class and the work is easy. What do you do? In your head."
"Think about other things." Skiping the fact of that he used Argus during the boring classes.
"Like what."
"Different problems, or things I've read. Particularly How things work."
He looked at the bookshelf behind her, the Silverman and Hollingworth and Gross that he had noticed on his first visit.
"Sometimes I just watch the other kids."
"What do you notice about them."
He thought about Tyler and nown and Madison's butterfly and the boy who ran in one direction and then back for no reason.
"They're very present," he said, picking the word carefully. "Whatever is happening right now is the whole thing for them. They're not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow or anything outside the room." He paused. "I find that interesting. I don't really understand it but I find it interesting."
Dr. Halpern had stopped writing and was just looking at him.
"Does it bother you?" she said. "Being different from them."
"No," he said. And then, because it was true and because she would know if he was being too tidy about it
"Sometimes it's lonely. But not in a bad way. Just as a fact."
She wrote that down.
"Do you have anyone you talk to?" she said. "About the things you think about."
"Not really."
"Your parents?"
"My dad tries," he said. "He's nice he just doesn't always follow." He paused. "My mom asks good questions but she's more interested in the answers than the conversation."
Dr. Halpern smiled at that, a genuine one. "That's a very precise distinction. Does it bother you when things aren't precise?"
"Yes," he said. "But I've learned to work with it."
Halpern wrote for a while without speaking.
Then she put her pen down and looked at him with the direct expression she had worn at the end of the first session, the one that had dropped the professional neutrality.
"You are the most unusual child I have encountered in twenty years of doing this work. Not just in terms of test scores, though those are extraordinary. In terms of how you think, how you talk, how you see things." She paused. "You present as a nine year old in most of the ways that matter. But there's something underneath that that I can't fully account for."
Jake kept his expression neutral.
"I don't say that to alarm you," she said. "I say it because I think you already know it and I think you're probably tired of pretending otherwise." She picked her pen back up. "You don't have to explain it to me. I'm not sure it's explainable. But I want you to know that whatever it is, it doesn't change my recommendation."
A silence.
"What is your recommendation," Jake said.
"High school, as we talked before" she said. "As soon as possible."
Jake nodded and picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.
"Thank you Dr. Halpern," he said.
"Thank you Jake." She looked at him one more time with that quiet unguarded look. "Take care of yourself."
He said he would and went out to the waiting room where Judith was sitting with her back straight and her notebook in her lap, ready for whatever came next.